Modern interrupt controllers typically are designed to support device virtualization with the assumption that there is a scheduler or scheduler architecture whereby the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) software traps every interrupt in order to make a scheduler decision regarding the high level operating system (HLOS) Guest to which the incoming interrupt should be routed. The VMM software routes the physical interrupt to the selected HLOS Guest as a virtual interrupt signal. The overhead associated with this VMM software routing step has been known to slowdown interrupt response time.
The mobile phone market sometimes deploys device virtualization as an access control infrastructure for a single guest HLOS, or as a virtualization solution with small number of guest HLOS instances (typically two). It is common in the mobile device virtualization environment that the interrupts, if not owned by the VMM, are owned by the current HLOS Guest. It is also common that the access control requirements allow the virtual processor identifier and virtual interrupt identifier to stay the same as the physical processor identifier and the physical interrupt identifier, respectively.